Dataless Transitions Between Concise Representations of Frequent Patterns

Abstract

For many data mining problems in order to solve them it is required to discover frequent patterns. Frequent itemsets are useful e.g. in the discovery of association and episode rules, sequential patterns and clusters. Nevertheless, the number of frequent itemsets is usually huge. Therefore, a number of lossless representations of frequent itemsets have recently been proposed. Two of such representations, namely the closed itemsets and the generators representation, are of particular interest as they can efficiently be applied for the discovery of most interesting non-redundant association and episode rules. On the other hand, it has been proved experimentally that other representations of frequent patterns happen to be more concise and more quickly extractable than these two representations even by several orders of magnitude. Hence, such concise representations seem to be an interesting alternative for materializing and reusing the knowledge of frequent patterns. The problem however arises, how to transform the intermediate representations into the desired ones efficiently and preferably without accessing the database. This article tackles this problem. As a result of investigating the properties of representations of frequent patterns, we offer a set of efficient algorithms for dataless transitioning between them.